Sandy's Blog

I asked for some leave recently, as there were about 8 holidays left this year to use. So I applied for Wednesday and Friday off, purely because Thursday is a gym day and have to go to Edinburgh anyway so might as well work too.

So, Wednesday went past and was pretty uneventful, I woke up at 11am after a late night, replaced a gear cable and went biking down Roslin Glen. This ride was pretty good although I met some old rambler people on a section where you really don’t want to (steep downhill with no way to stop or scrub off speed). Luckily one of them had the sense to move out of the way, otherwise I would have had to hit one of them or deal with a sheer drop to the side.

Friday (today). Very very very cold. Went out for a bike ride in the Pentlands. It was such a good day for biking, the ground was very very grippy due to the hard frost - which meant trails usually designated for the best summer days were potentially ridable. I went up to the Kips and then headed towards Black Hill, where my back brake decided to fall apart. I fixed the problem with a shonky bodge, the clips to keep the pads apart, and secure the restraining pin had broken off.

Hike-a-bike up the side of Black Hill, and head off downhill narrowly missing a farm-labourer-looking chap that appeared round a corner. Half way down I realise my back brake is now totally gone, front only from here on (Pretty tricky this, as trying to use my back brake would possibly render it irrepairable - my left hand needed to stay glued to the bars). I do the bombhole and cut through a small cleuch normally reserved for much better weather.

The path is ace to start off, a nice km or two of singletrack, with a drop to the left. It then quickly deteriorated, turning off-camber and icey which was even more dodgy with only a front brake (locking front wheel while skittering across ice is interesting). It eventually spits me out on the road to Flotterstone and I just head home. Great day, but a bit expensive - I think I also buckled the back wheel!

Slightly related to my last post, my computer has been broken so I have been unable to blog! I went to a LAN party at a friends house on Saturday, and basically my BSU burnt out. To cut a long story short I have purchased a much better, quieter one for £25.

So, what else has been going on? Well, my mother is just back from Thailand which sounded great, but the jet lag isn’t. I am not welcome to the concept of 5am housework anyway - which is why i’m writing this now!

Due to me getting accosted to this LAN party on Saturday, I didn’t go cycling. So when I woke up yesterday I had bags of energy. Really couldn’t face the mountain bike because its so trashed and broken (going to have to fix it for next weekends racing). I decided to go for a decent run on the road bike - with my new gafa’s! They are teh rave!

Went through Penicuik, out via Leadburn (Leadburn Inn is totally levelled due to a car crashing through the front - note that there is now nothing left) and went down the A701 past West Linton. I decided although it was bloody freezing, that I wanted to go on a decent ride so continued on towards Biggar. At some point (somewhere past Blyth Bridge) I take a wrong turn and add a few extra miles onto the trip, and connect up to the A702. Eventually I get to Biggar, and find the nearest tea room.

As soon as I enter the tea room, I realise just how cold I am. There are cold ‘burn’ marks on my face, I can’t feel my feet much, and my hands are purple (even with massive winter gloves on). 3.5 cups of tea, caramel slice, sandwich and a pee later, im ready to head back. Its now 4:20 in the afternoon and most definately getting dark, so I stick my lights on and go back the way I should have travelled down in the first place. Went through Skirling about a mile or two out of Biggar - nice place but not much to it. I decided to ‘rip it up’ from here as I was so cold, and got to the West Linton junction in 30-40 mins where I turned off onto the back road. Those 3.5 cups of tea needed output, but there was always a car going one way or another. When (I thought) it was all clear I took a whizz by a hedge - for a car to come round the corner - doh.

The last 10 miles or so was via Dunsyke Forest on the single track road between West Linton and Penicuik. This, from memory, is pretty shonky in places with huge potholes etc - and it was pitch black I couldn’t see anything. Going through Penicuik met the usual string of drivers try to run me over - I don’t understand when it gets dark, drivers just seem to get more agitated and take loads of risks. I was definately visable (tons of reflectives on my jacket, shorts and shoes, reflective strip on my bag and bike lights). Possibly frustrated because I was travelling at approximately the speed limit and they couldn’t pass?

Got home, totally freezing - hot shower, excellent. Check GPS, 47.5 miles. Not bad going. There is also the added bonus that my bike and clothes are pretty much clean, I don’t sweat much when its as cold as it was yesterday!

Using water to cool computers is nothing new. I always thought ‘I will get round to it’, but to be perfectly honest it has always been too expensive and the options available have been too shonky.

Two dark moons must have collided during the middle of last week (round about the time when I caught office plague - aka the cold), and I bought a Zalman Reserator 1 Plus from Ebay.

The reasons you may want to cool your computer with water (as opposed to air) are as follows:

• More Efficient - Water conducts heat well, and using pumps you can move the heat somewhere else (i.e away from the critical parts of your computer)
• Noise Reduction - Air cooling means lots of noisy fans. Water cooling requires almost inaudible pumps
• Geek Points - Goes without saying really, although not something to boast about around normal people

It arrived on Friday in a huge box. At this point I was regretting the purchase conceding that I was just on a geek train, and I bought it because the illness had confined me to the house to think up crazy stuff like this, kinda like comfort eating for geeks.

Anyway, I open it all up. The main part of the system is a huge black tower sits near your computer and dissipates heat. It has an EU plug (two prong), and I needed to get distilled water and thermal paste. Right at this moment i’m teetering on sending the whole thing back, but I grit my teeth, replace the plug, and take a trip to Halfords for the water.

The Install

1. Figure out what the hell is going on

   I try to work out how the schematic in the manual will apply to my PC. The case I have is quite small and there is not much room left in it. Basically I had to think up a way in which I could test the water system for leaks without damaging my computer, but without having to disconnect and reconnect everything after the test to do the final install. I figured as long as I get everything in the right order, the only place it would have to traverse my computer would be the entry point (though the PCI slots - horizontal expansion cards at the rear).
   I decide to take my time here and familiarise myself with all the parts, and then do a final check for CPU (Main Computer Processor) and GPU (Graphics Card Processor) compatibility. These are the main generators of heat in my computer, and the kit basically gives you aluminum and copper ‘waterblocks’ to put on these chips. These blocks conduct heat well, and water system runs through these blocks taking the heat away from them (and therefore taking the heat away from the Processors).

   
2. Plumbing

   One huge bit of anti-kink hose, one clueless and ill geek. I work out how much tube I will need to go between the CPU and GPU but avoiding the power supply (roughly 30cm). So I cut and fit. I now start to realise what I have paid the best part of £200 for. The blocks, tubing and fittings are very high quality, like stuff you would get in industry as opposed to consumer grade equipment. I became much more confident about the ability of the kit here, there is a water flow indicator (thats right - indicator, not alarm) that fits onto the pipe, and fittings (with quick release) that connect to the Reserator (big black tower). This part went fine.

   
3. Graphics Card

   My graphics card has a very puny heatsink and fan on it which I will have to remove. Cue 10 minutes of attacking with pliers, before I manage to lever it off with a screwdriver. The kit came with ram heatsinks for my graphics card - I didn’t ask for them but thought there would be no harm sticking them on the graphics card anyway. I stick the mounting kit (with washers and everything) on the card, but leave the GPU waterblock off because I haven’t tested it yet.

   
4. Main Processor

   At this point I realise I have made a slight schoolboy error. To mount the CPU waterblock using the supplied fittings I would need to remove the motherboard (the huge rectangular thing at the back that everything else plugs into) from the case fittings - i.e a complete strip-down. Bah. So anyway I take all the PCI cards out, unscrew all the motherboard screws (thank god for the electric screwdriver), and pull the motherboard out.
   Now playing with motherboards always makes me nervous. I’m sure that I managed to knacker my old computer by faffing with the motherboard and applying too much force, to what is generally a precision piece of equipment. The old bike mechanic saying of ‘if it doesn’t go, force it’ really does not apply here. Anyway, I manage to put the base fittings on ok, and put everything back into the computer. Sorted.

   
5. Water System Test

   So everything is connected. I double check all the fittings by giving them a slight tug. All ok. I fill up the system with just over 2l of distilled watter, and 500ml of supplied coolant (I’m guessing its similar to anti-freeze - it stops your system freezing but also boiling?). Sweet, a nice aqua tinge appears in the flow indicator. Nothing leaking yet .. I turn on the pump. Still all good, nothing leaking. The manual says leave it on for an hour and check for leaks, so I go out for a few hours. When I come back nothing has spilled out so I assume that is a pass.

   
6. Fitting

   Firstly I apply 3g of thermal paste onto the graphics card GPU core (this has quite a large area so I use it all). I then slide on the waterblock and secure it using the fittings. The graphics card then fits nicely into the AGP socket. Attaching the waterblock to the main processor was a bit trickier to do. Firstly I was using the wrong length of screws initially, and the force I was using to try and fix the waterblock down could have easily damaged the CPU core. At one point the waterblock (~1 Kg of copper) was skating around on top of the core - not good! I eventually manage to lock it down, then realise that the hoses for the water are tangled and I need to take it off to get the correct routing - goddamit! I take it off and fix it down again - correctly this time.

   
   
7. Complete System Testing

   With everything connected properly and plugged in, I switch the beast on. To be perfectly honest I wasn’t expecting it to work, I had literally unplugged everything, moved everything around, put a lot of force on fragile components etc etc. But it worked first time … sigh of relief. My computer, sitting on my kitchen table with the inside exposed, made one hell of a racket. This was because I still had 2 fans & loads of hard drives in the computer, plus the table acted like an amplifier. But at least it worked, thank god.

   
8. PSU, Hard Drives, Fan(s)

   My PSU (Power Supply) had 2 large and noisy fans in it, and they didn’t seem to be extracting much heat. So out comes the power drill, out goes the warranty, and I nuke the fans. One of the fans was right against sheet aluminum anyway so I doubt it was much use. My computer had a few unused hard drives and a floppy drive in it, which I take out and store (will sell them later). I stick everything back together, tidy stuff up and install one variable speed case fan in the 3.5″ drive bays, projecting towards the RAM slots (memory) and Northbridge, secured using cable ties of course!

Impressions/Overall Opinion

It is very good. And reasonably quiet - passes the sleep test (I can fall asleep easily with my computer on, which is good considering I live out in the boonies!). My CPU temperature, which used to hover around 60-65 degrees idle, had dropped to around 30 degrees idle. This is obviously a good thing. Although this was not the primary reason why I bought the kit, I have had a go at overclocking my system a little (running it a bit faster than it was initially made to run), with some success.

sdt@tard ~ $ cat /proc/cpuinfo
model name : AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2100+
cpu MHz : 1760.263
bogomips : 3525.88

Thats from ~1666 Mhz, so around a 100Mhz improvement - stable. Nice. On a loaded system (doing something intensive where both the GPU & CPU are used) while overclocked, the temperature can get up towards 45 degrees. The graph below was is me playing quake 3 from a previously idle system, and 1 horizontal unit is 2 seconds (i.e whole graph is about 25 minutes).

So is water cooling your computer worth the money? This is a difficult question to answer, it is expensive and it doesn’t make your computer any faster. The only real improvement that most people would care about is reduced noise. I am reckoning that it is an overkill solution to cooling, and will support any upgrades I make in the next 3-4 years (if I buy suitable waterblocks etc).

It just depends on how important aesthetics are to you. If you are one of these people who are still using CRT monitors, forget it. But if you moved to a LCD monitor and really appreciate the difference it made on your eyes, its that sort of change just not so apparent. The installation of this system definitely isn’t for wimps either, although I had no trouble - I do stuff like this all the time. Can you really afford to catastrophically break your computer?

Now being an ex-student without free hours on tap, I have turned into a irregular computer gamer - I might play games one or two evenings a week but thats it. One of the games I play which has stood the test of time is CCTF for Quake 3 Arena. The basic objective is to capture (cap) the enemy flag by stealing it from their base and taking it to yours. But that ain’t the half of it. You have a grappling hook, a huge amount of temporal and permanent power ups, weapons and maps to play with.

The big seller is the grappling hook, which can make or break the game for your team. If you have a good grappler that is difficult to hit and can move fast, you are more likely to cap - and therefore win.

Obviously with 6-a-side its very much a team game, and you have to time the armour and converge where the quad damage spawns every few minutes, but the grapple makes such a difference.

So anyway, enter my team. I play for a clan (team) called Fun Loving Quakers (FLQ), who I have been with for about 4 years. As you might guess from the name, the team is not entirely pr0. While you probably think that all people who play computer games such as this are late teens/early twenties and male, think again. We have a few older people and women in the clan, a teenage boy (although he might have left now) and 2-3 20something blokes such as myself, from countries all around Europe. With most clans, players seem to join for a while, get bored then leave. We have had more or less the same players for the time I have been with the team. Sure a number of people have moved on but the same hard-core of players are still around and active. Part of the reason for this is that the regular CCTF community is so small, with maybe in the region of 100-150 active players.

The reason im blogging about this, it that im playing in The Last Evar CCTF Cup, which is a real shame as it is so good, however Q3 will have to move over for Q4 at some point.

We had a practise (praccy) this evening against the team we are to play on Monday evening (Rogue Warriors). They are very good, but also really nice people I think. We got taken to pieces in the first map and lost by a lot of caps, but in the second map we managed a 4-2 loss so not all bad. For the game on Monday we have decided to beef up the defence and camp power ups a bit more in response to their tactics.

Game 1

Game 2